Douglass tells his own story a third time — as a free man looking back on the whole of it.

Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass · 1881

By 1881, Frederick Douglass had already published two autobiographies — the 1845 Narrative that made him famous and put him at risk of recapture, and the 1855 My Bondage and My Freedom. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass is his last and fullest account, written from the vantage of a man who has become a U.S. Marshal and Recorder of Deeds, met four presidents, and outlived most of his fellow abolitionists. It carries his story from an unrecorded birth on a Maryland plantation through the fight with Edward Covey that he calls the turning point of his life, an escape he still refuses to fully explain even decades later, and into the public battles of Reconstruction — recruiting Black regiments, advising Lincoln, and returning, near the book's end, to shake the hand of the man who once enslaved him.

41 chapters · 184,543 words · ~14 hr read